PREPARING TO DEPART!

The countdown to my 19 weeks in the Coffeyville Amazon warehouse is on!  Amazon will start paying for our spot on August 10, which is actually one day less than 3 weeks away.

Our space rent is paid here until the 6th of August, but we wanted to leave early to have more time in Coffeyville before starting, but now I'm not so sure that's wise.

The thing is, I've got my new Amazon seller's account just set up, and I have a storage unit that's half full of products that I've sourced for selling, and haven't listed yet.  Some of it will have to go on eBay, but anything with a UPC that's already in the Amazon database is fair game, and IF (that's one big IF, by the way) I can find enough things to list to make moving into FBA sooner rather than later worthwhile, then I have less than 3 weeks to do that.

That's where it gets a little sticky for me.  The weather has been so hot that I haven't been able to do much in the storage unit - we are darned lucky that we managed to get everything moved into one unit, and it's not well packed or organized right now.  So I'm pondering whether or not to attempt doing this now in the 2 to 3 weeks I have left her, or if my attention would be better spent working on some of my online projects that have multiplied like mushrooms.

I bought the No Cost Income Stream resale rights, and I have not yet set up my own sales page, in large part because I'm still working my way through the videos.  So I'm just promoting the course as it sits on Clickbank. 

I'm blogging daily about the process of selling on Amazon on my blog "Online Income, Honestly" and in order to keep in having new stuff to write about, I sure need to keep doing things.  Which is why I am even thinking about trying to list more stuff in the next couple of weeks.

Of course I'm still working on my Squidoo Lenses, because that's where most of my affiliate income is coming from.  I'm CCGAL on Squidoo, too, and if I forgot to mention it, I just won the 250 lens award last week. 

But, getting ready to go, that's got to be our number one priority.  Making sure we have everything on board that we are going to need for the next 5 months, so we don't end up running out to buy things we forgot. 

Carrying items for shipping is not an option - not only is there no room to carry it, we are going to be so busy and so tired for the next few months, we are not going to feel like packing and shipping much of anything.  So I will either have to ship things in on FBA, or put the store on vacation hold.  Given that FBA will require at minimum the $40/month pro account, I would need to ship in enough product to earn revenue of at least $200 between now and the end of the year.  That makes it much easier to determine the priority of my various options.  Cost vs benefit analysis.  Now I will need to go look at my stock in storage so I can make an informed decision and exercise good judgement in the process.

Here's a new thought - have you considered shopping at a Pawn Shop for goods?

I have to say that I had never even thought of it, but the managers of the RV park here said that they picked up their laptops at a pawn shop.  I had asked where they got them, because I'd done some work on one of their laptops and found the hard drive full of personal information from a previous owner, including links to the grade school records online for 3 daughters, many family photos, videos, and a music library full of rap and hip-hop that I knew the mgr would not be listening to.  So I wondered who would sell a laptop and fail to wipe the drive before sending it off to a new home.  Anyway, that's how I got the idea to look for a laptop at a Pawn Shop.

Which is why I am now working on a "new to me" unit that's got more memory, more storage space, and windows 7 instead of Vista.

The price was very, very reasonable - in fact, after we bought this unit, we headed over to our Wal-Mart where I'd been ogling the laptops for weeks, because sharing with my son has been difficult for both of us.  I was also lucky enough to find a unit that is enough like my old one to be familiar, because the newer models have smaller screens and I really like the large one.  For the same price, I'd have gotten a lot less for my money buying new.  Of course, I took a risk, because I don't know where the unit has been or how good the internals are, but I was willing to risk it, and here we are, getting to know each other.

Moving up to Windows 7 is a little weird, because it looks different, and things are not where I think they should be.  Plus I had to move up from Windows Mail to Windows Live Mail, which I don't really like yet, but am resigned to having to learn to use.

The second issue was, of course, how to move all my files and settings.  We thought it would be easy peasy because we had a Belkin Transfer Cable, but it turned out that cable is only good for moving from an XP to a Vista platform.  Useless for Vista to Windows 7.  I was hoping I could just buy a software upgrade, but neither LapLink nor Belkin had anything like that I could find, and Belkin's customer service options were ridiculously difficult to navigate.

I decided I would move files using my Seagate Replica as an external HD, so I spent several hours letting the old computer copy files, while I let the new computer download a zillion updates for windows, adobe reader, flash, java and all the other things that it needed.  I haven't downloaded my free OpenOffice yet, but that will come today.

The one thing I was most worried about was my XSitePro2 software.  Lucky for me, I saved the .exe file for installing it, and with a little luck, later today I will install it.  I started the install last night, but the computer was still needing to download updates, so I canceled and did all the updates first.  Got the virus checking software downloaded and installed, and ran a bunch of tests.  One nice thing about this pawn shop purchase is that this machine was carefully wiped prior to pawn, though I suspect it was the owner, not the pawn shop which did it.

And now that I've shared this today, it's back to the task at hand - getting all moved in on the "new" computer so I can get busy listing my stuff on eBay before we have to leave here for our next adventure up in Coffeyville at the Amazon warehouse as part of their Camper

My long planned and much anticipated trip out to California came to a screeching halt not too long ago.  It's my own fault, really, because I put off applying for Amazon work at the Fernley, Nevada site, while working through some family drama and some big moving chores.

Once the dust settled and our things were finally all safe in a single location, and I could see my way clear to work another season at Amazon, the Fernley location had hired enough work campers for the season and were putting people on a waiting list.  There were already 7 ahead of us for that list, so we opted to apply to Coffeyville again, expecting to start in October again, which would still leave us time to get to CA and back.

But we got a surprise.  They asked us to start on August 13, with our campsite being paid from Aug 10, and a 2 hr meet and greet non-paid on Sunday the 12th.  That was a good thing for us from a financial perspective, but it sure played hell with our plans for going to California.

So I had to reconcile myself to missing the 70's decade reunion, along with the first Muse family reunion in over 40 years.  Not to mention missing the fun stuff planned for my birthday and my favorite Indian Casinos in Del Norte and Humboldt counties. 

But I have learned, or mostly learned, that things have a way of working out, even when I can't see it at first.  I don't know why this happened, I only know that in some way it will serve me well.  If we can stand up to the work, and save most of what we earn during those 19 weeks, we may have a fighting chance of having a fairly decent 2013.

So for now the plan is to stay here in this inexpensive RV Park for another 2 to 3 weeks while we take care of some medical needs my son has, and then it's go North, but not to Alaska.  Just through Oklahoma to Kansas.